Zach’s Zany Movie Reviews: CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS – THE EPIC FIRST MOVIE

“Uranus is a gas giant.” Did you laugh at that sentence? If you did, you are more than likely to enjoy Dreamwork’s new CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS – THE EPIC FIRST MOVIE. I laughed at that and laughed at many other things including a toy turtle shower joke. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, considering that this movie is epically 20 years too late. The first Captain Underpants books premiere in 1997, when I was 11 years old. I am now 30. Yikes. But I decided to see it because of it’s good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and due to the fact that I like the writer Nicholas Stoller, who gave us Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him To The Great, Neighbors, and the recent animated film Storks, which I also liked quite a bit. I’m glad I did, because I did have a good time. While not a new classic film to watch over and over again, it is an excellent film that families can enjoy together.

In this film, there is not only enough entertainment for the kids, but jokes that adults will only get as well. And the adult jokes don’t cross the line for once. I also like what they did with the property, doing pretty much being completely faithful to its source materials, but with more wild and zany humor to keep the very young to the very old’s attention. The movie is a short 85 minutes, and the pace is lightening fast and perfect, barely giving you a moment to breathe. I won’t explain the plot on here because to explain any of it will be giving most of it away. Let’s just say it’s about two best friends that own their own comic book company/series and they have to deal with school and their a-hole of a principal.

The voice acting also makes this movie. I usually find Kevin Hart annoying and not funny but this is the first voice acting he has done where he actually sounds not too much like himself and a kid-like, like his character George. In fact, if you go back and read the novel after seeing the movie, all the voice actors they got transpose perfectly in your head to what you read on the page. Thomas Middletitch, who plays Richard as Silicon Valley, is perfect playing Hart’s best friend Harold. Nick Kroll, after being the awesome Douche in Sausage Party, does a awesome as Professor Poopypants. And finally Ed Helms as Captain Underpants is spot on perfect for what I thought he would sound like. The voice acting can make or break a picture, but fortunately here it only enhances its zaniness.

Well I already kind of answered this question but is this film appropriate for your kids? Absolutely! If you are worried about the adult jokes, they really aren’t that bad, are actually quite funny, and your kids probably won’t get them anyway, and if they do, they’ll find them amusing and not be overly sensitive. This is a great family picture by Dreamworks. Usually Disney and Pixar are the only two to do it perfectly, but maybe Dreamworks can take this and start translating it to all of their animated films. But yeah, this is a surprise summer movie for me. I laughed a lot, enjoyed the story, and enjoyed my time. Definitely not wasted.